This is a very, very brief prologue to what promises to be coming up soon – a comprehensive review of the Ubuntu OS from a first-timer’s point of view. But let me make a start anyway, since that’s going to take a while evaluating.

A brief background – I’ve run Windows for almost two decades, right from the prehistoric Windows 3.11. I’m not a techie or a programmer. My exposure to Unix has been, aside from a few hours in school as part of a standard systems course, more according to Scott Adams than anyone else. So why did I do this? One late night, I was bored. And a random link came along – not for an OS, but for USB drive tweaks. And one thing led to another…

Considering it takes the better part of a few hours to install a basic WinXP system from a formatted C:, creating a bootable, non-install trial cd which can actually run an entire OS was a very pleasant surprise. I was playing around with it for a while, and it felt… interesting. Different, but fun.